Front Porch: Typoman ready to rescue us from exasperating language

“As a superhero, I would be Typoman, the writer of wrongs.”

When I first read this, I thought – finally, a role model I can truly relate to, a savior of all of mankind from the crimes of language abuse. Not that I always get it right myself, mind you, but I endeavor to, and often, when I play with words, I am aware of the mud puddles into which I’ve jumped.

(Note: Dangling preposition both used and avoided in previous paragraph.)

The goal surely would be to revise entirely the English language so it makes sense. A large task, no doubt, but that’s what superheroes do. I am helped in this endeavor by observations from real life and contributions from like-minded readers.

I begin with a story from my late father, who maintained that English was the hardest language to learn and get right … and pronounce, even when you know the rules. German-born, he came to America as a young man, and set about becoming American, which included speaking the language.

In English, “ch” has a hard sound (as in chair and chin), but in German, it’s soft, and sounds like “shh.” He would ask my mother, his American-born wife, to correct this when he was wrong. If he would say “share” for “chair” or “shin” for “chin” she would do so. And finally, he got it, and was quite proud of himself, I was told.

One day, as they strolled by a department store, he noticed a display of fancy bedroom furniture in the window. “Oh, look, Julia, there’s a ‘ch’aise lounge.” “No, Werner,” she told him. “That’s ‘sh’aise lounge.”

“Dagnabbit (I paraphrase here), nobody can ever get this dang (see previous parenthetical note) language right,” he said in exasperation.

And on another language usage front, many Inland Northwest residents have been sharing with me their frustrations about the importance of commas, and how we screw them up a lot of the time, and about which I’ve written often (usually when I’m on a grammar rant, which I have been in the middle of for a bit now).

It’s not just style or fussiness. It’s about meaning and comprehension, the most common of which is in a book title – “Eats, Shoots and Leaves” by Lynne Truss. In that usage, it sounds like an armed panda goes into a restaurant to dine, commits a firearms violation and then exits the premises. Without the comma, it’s about the dining preferences of said mammal.

I’ve been given and found online a lot of examples. How about these sentences – No more beer. Or – No, more beer. Is it time to eat, Mom? Is it time to eat Mom? Please use caution when hunting pedestrians using walking trails. Please use caution when hunting, pedestrians using walking trails.

A lot of time, these are funny. But I put forth the notion that grammatical precision could save lives.

And then there are English verbs, which also drove my father crazy. Regular verbs are put into the past tense by the addition of an “ed” at the end – lift/lifted, dance/danced. About 97% of the verbs in the English language fall into this category.

But … irregular verbs are our most-used verbs. Hence, the problem.

Among the irregular verbs most often used (though the list varies) are these – go, say, see, get, is, do, have, give, take and come. And their past and past participle tenses are all over the place. A few examples – go/went/gone, do/did/done, see/saw/seen, give/gave/given.

It doesn’t matter if you started out speaking English or another language, this can get tough. Although I’ve since learned that English, while considered a difficult language to learn as a second language, is by far not the most difficult – those would be Mandarin, Arabic and Russian on most lists ranking such things, and Hungarian is named as having the most difficult grammar.

While I cheerfully don the impossible cape of Typoman, I do fear that we’re just going to be stuck with our messy, illogical and quite often beautiful and poetic language … or abandon it completely, as the following meme might suggest – for our own health, of course.

Japanese eat very little fat, while Mexicans eat a good deal of it. Africans drink very little red wine, and Germans drink lots of beer and consume lots of sausages. All of these people suffer fewer heart attacks than Americans. Conclusion: Eat and drink what you like. Apparently, speaking English is what kills you.

Voices correspondent Stefanie Pettit can be reached by email at upwindsailor@comcast.net.